FiberGeneration

Just This (Tribute To Gülper)

From Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, CA, March 2001.

It's A Big World

For the first time since a decade or so, I haven't travelled that much this year. That is what happens when shit happens ;-) Anyway, between such a 'quiet' year as this one and a 'crazy' one like the Year 2000 for me - I collected more than 150 boarding passes from Jan. 1st to Dec.31st, exclusively for business purposes, thanks to Agilent Technologies - there should be the right balance somewhere ! Just for fun, here are the countries I have visited over the last 10 years, for business. Interesting : with 26 different countries, that's only 10% of the whole planet !
However, I have had the chance to do business with 39% of the World (89 countries) !...
To create your own visited country map, go at world66.com here I will publish soon my real travel maps : per cities, not countries. Because staying in Stockholm for one night doesn't mean you know Sweden, like San Francisco is not USA per say ;-)

Wengo

I just discovered Wengo a few days ago, thanks to the famous 'Web3' conference held in Paris, France, earlier this week. Wengo is a french startup surfing on the Web 2.0 wave, who provides a competencies sharing tool (online, of course), using its WengoPhone. See the nice widget on the sidebar. Will it work ? I don't know. Will it be useful ? I don't know. As many of the startups in this new Bubble - ooops, sorry ;-), in this new era, Wengo is currently operating in beta mode. So, better give it... a try !

ps : the WengoPhone is competing against Skype. My suggestion : download it (here) and do the comparison yourself. After setting up my account on Wengo and searching for contacts, I can tell you : Wengo is not a threat for the P2P giant. Just an example : when you search a new contact with Skype, you stay within the program, a pop-up window coming up with speed and grace; doing the same thing with Wengo, you have to go onto a website... There is room for improvements !

Features List

I created FiberGeneration.com as a product. I held numerous brainstorming sessions with myself for a long time, I drafted the roadmap, I built the product plan, I put together the marketing and the sales plans. Then, I started the implementation. As of today, the execution is fairly on schedule. A couple of issues with the widgets here and there, that's it. However, I missed to complete one thing for you : the feature list, i.e. what are you going to read next time on this blog.

I am glad to introduce now this 'future articles list', for you to get a better vision of what's coming up next (no chronological order here) :

- Steve Jobs, the most brillant son of Raymond Loëwy (it's about Industrial Design)

- A bozzo in business (nothing to do with the above !)

- The Pocket-OTDR (that's related to the bozzo thing ;-)

- Product Design : Steve Jobs on Microsoft Zune (this one is also a bozzo thing ;-)

- My take on Web 2.0 gadgets in the Telecoms Test & Measurement industry (very serious)

- Launch fiber vs. patchcord in OTDR testing (don't worry, it's not for experts)

- Selling Pierre Cardin suits (my best experience as a salesman so far)

- Testing 2.0 (finally) : Onto a true low-cost business model in the Telecoms Test & Measurement industry (very serious, huh ?)

- Best Of The Week (this one is planned for next week)

Plus, as many as I can publish on my numerous experiences at HP/Agilent, without breaking the confidentiality rule.

I hope you will enjoy the ride !

See you next time, Opera !

It's a given my wife and I will go back to the Opera de Paris soon. However, the title of this post is not about operas and ballets : it's about Opera 9.0, the wonderful web browser which I have been using for the last 2 months or so. A wonderful software, featuring amazing functions, with a cute design. Nevertheless, Opera is not in the Top-3 list of the most popular browsers today, so there are too many limitations using it with most of the web sites at the moment. For instance, no WYSIWYG when typing a post on TypePad, inactive buttons on lots of web pages, etc.  That is why I switched to Firefox 2, which is much more supported by almost all web sites now. The lesson of the day : when a niche product you like do not fulfill all your requirements for a seamless/smooth/painless use, give it up. Go for a more mainstreamed one, even if it lacks some of your preferred features or if you don' t like its design : you will increase your productivity anyway ! In the meantime, send your feedback to the vendor/creator of the former and wait for its next major release.

ps : I decided to ban the word ' but ' from all my writings, including this blog. I tell you : it's quite fun ;-)

Just This (11)

Somewhere in the desert north of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, May 2003.

About Slideshare (again ;-)

Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen has posted a very complete article about Slideshare. In summary, Garr still wonders what the so-called presentation sharing website is about. As I do (although I am proud to have one of my presentations in the Top-40 of the month ;-)...

Rehearsal

Last evening, my wife and I went to the Opera Bastille in Paris, for the last public rehearsal of the 'Coppelia' ballet before its premiere today. Except for a tiny little problem with some mechanics at the end of Act II, everything worked fine - at least for novices like ourselves (we discussed with a couple of former dancers of the Opera de Paris during the break : they said the girls were running after the music, which was pretty invisible to the majority of the audience ;-).

Last Saturday, we went to the Winter Gala event of the Rhythmic Gymnastics club where our daughter spends 4 hours a week. All teams were present to perform at the show, from the 5-yo beginners to the 20-something athletes competing in national-wide events. It turned out to be a disaster, with the management completely lost, between hardware failure (CD player, speakers, etc.), last-minute changes in the agenda, and... the audience' disinterest. After the break, only half of the people were still there, most of them waiting for their own daughter(s) to be done with her own performance.

What is the connection between the two events ? Rehearsal. It is a given that the folks at the Opera de Paris do their homework before showing up on stage before a 1,000 something audience. We had the chance to meet with some guys of the crew : brief - execute - debrief, that is how they proceed since a month or so, each and every day, from 8:00AM to 11:00PM. When we went backstage after the show, I saw the director debriefing with his staff, including the top-dancers. That is how things have to be, if you want to get applauses and the people to come back next time. I am sure that the RG club never done a rehearsal at all. The word ' preparation ' is unknown to them. For one reason : the management don't care about the audience - who nevertheless are the people who pay them thru the club member fees. They are like a business owner who don't care about his customers, who nevertheless are the people who pay him at the end of the day.

When you care about your audience, who ever it is - the people coming to see your performance on stage at your theatre, the parents of children doing gymnastics at your club, or the customers of your company, doing rehearsal before any event is mandatory. That is a fundamental part of the presentation. It helps you to go through all the potential issues you may face during the event itself, from the stage and audience' room settings to all your materials - hardware, audio, video, paper, whatever - from the agenda to the content itself, etc. You fine tune every single detail, for the best possible performance during the event itself. That is something I have learned all along my six years with Agilent Technologies : at the beginning, we were not holding real rehearsal sessions for the training events or the customers seminars we were part of. So, we were just presenters as others. Once we decided to do better, in order to reach the #1 position, we became #1 presenters at each and every event we were doing. No kidding. Our method was crisp & clear : set the team, i.e. the owner of the event, the team leader, the presenter(s), and all the resources needed, each one with his own tasks list, each of us responsible for our own part and for the whole team. That was teamwork at its best expression : one for all (the team), all for one (the objective : the success of the event). We improved our method, doing at least three rehearsals for each event, repeating over and over again the whole stuff.

And more important - perhaps the most important thing about preparing an event in its very details : it's a matter of respect. Of your audience.

The Asymptotic Twitter Curve

Monday is going to be my ' blogging day '. Why the Monday ? Because on the mondays, you can't pick up the phone and call your prospects or clients. Monday is the back-from-the-week-end day, where people still have part of their brain connected to those wonderful/restful/delightful days when they were * off *. Monday is also the back-to-business-as-usual day, where people spend most of the day checking emails and voicemails, reading the latest company's news, preparing the weekly briefing (shall you be an R&D engineer or a Sales man working at a 20+ people firm, you know what I mean), etc. In summary, I never call clients and prospects on the Monday because nobody will listen. By chance, they don't call on me neither (I mean, on Mondays ;-)
Better make the best use of the day, to do things that can't afford interruptions. Blogging is one. So, let's blog !

Speaking of interruptions, this recent post by Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users is worth reading. It's all about the impact of the Web 2.0 on people' s daily life. Which turns out to become purely an StayAlwaysOnline life. The last avatar of this scarring trend : TwiterCurve. You've got to see it to believe it : members tell the World what they are doing at the very moment they are posting, anwsering the simple question : " what are you doing now ? "... It reminds me the days of the (first ?) Bubble, when the whole Telecoms industry was a planet by itself, where vendors were selling to their customers who were also their own vendors, without any link to the Outside World (the rest of us). At Telecom Geneva in 1999, I was exhibitor with HP/Agilent Technologies. During a morning when I was not on booth duty, I took the opportunity to visit the show. It was a real shock for me : 80% of the whole exhibition was made of vendors selling to the other exhibitors - in brief : vendors selling to their vendors. A pure vicious circle. No one was addressing the Real World : us, as consumers.
Today, I wonder if the Web 2.0 thing as a whole is not turning out to be a new Bubble : who cares about what I am doing right now, but myself or my wife ?...

My Plazes

Here is my page on Plazes. Don't take it as granted : I am not in Lausanne at the moment (unfortunately, beacuse it would be nice for me to see some snow around ;-)

Plazes

Among the handfull Web 2.0 startups that I am currently watching, for what they can bring as new applications or ways of doing business in the Telecoms world, there is Plazes. The Plazes website automatically detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby. It can also be told to remember the locations you visit so you can review your travels. Plazes lets you share your current location with your IM client such as Skype, your blog, or any other application thru third-parties APIs. A nice tool for frequent travellers, and perhaps a lot more.
This afternoon, I have spent almost one hour trying to upload the eight locations corresponding to my actual clients and partners across the planet. No chance ! Everytime I want to add a new location, Plazes considers it as my actual one, deleting the previous. Either there is something I didn't catch about the way to do that simple job, either the terminology " beta " is pretty accurate here ;-) As my former boss and still friend was used to say : I will do better tomorrow !

Slideshare : update 2

What a great start for a great week to come ! My presentation on my new (ad)venture Wahoom! is now the sixth most popular on Slideshare. With 632 views over 5 days, it is close to the #5 which does 699 views over 6 days. However, I'm far away of the Number One, who hits more than 1,100 views for 4 days on the show only.
I got no comment so far, but I'm not the only one in the Top-10 ;-) So, I understand that Slideshare' s audience is mostly composed of people looking for great images - i still wonder about the content, when it's not about a Web 2.0 thing. Then, I created a new slideshow this morning, containing only photos, to compare with a more * serious * one (e.g. a business oriented presentation). It's available here. After 12 minutes on the Web, it got already 2 views.

Just this on Just This

I owe you the truth. I have not posted my weekly photo on Friday last week. I did today, Monday morning, using the 'Publish On a specific date' feature of TypePad.
I just wanted to demonstrate the fantastic ability to manipulate the Time on the Web today...

Just This (10)

Dubai Creek, United Arab Emirates, October 2002.

Churn, Baby, churn *

* The Art of The Start, Guy Kawasaki.

I have modified a couple of things on this blog today. First of all, the 'About Me' page is now completed, with a bunch of new posts - written today but dated October, thanks to the magic of html ;-) and a couple of downloadable files. I also changed my favorite blogs list, which is now simply using a BlogRolling' blogroll (Heck, I love the Web 2.0 terminology ;-). Last, I have disabled the 'Pacte Ecologique' banner, for I am looking for a nicer version of it.

Testing Slideshare : update

As of this morning 10:00AM CET, the Wahoom! introduction is ranked #20 of the week, with 211 views (i swear I have not setup an Automator robot to create artificial hits from my Mac ;-). Hey, ten years after my golden age on Usenet, my name will soon com back in the search engines !
The Powerline/FTTH comics continues with a 10 hits a day, with 54 views.
I have uploaded a new version of the Wahoom' presentation, with a new name that includes the "2.0" gimmick, and new tags such as "internet" and "sales". Will see which outcomes in a couple of days.

Testing SlideShare

I have tested SlideShare, for it being a new Web 2.0 tool to share presentations. Here are my first feedback, as a publisher (vs. me as a simple user/reader, which is quite different) :
- uploading a file is an easy one, no problem at all. Of course, better have a broadband connection...
- the current version of Slideshare is limited to .ppt and .pps file formats : that is an issue for us Macintosh users, because we must export from Keynote to Powerpoint. Okay, it's a one-click operation with Keynote, but still, it's one click more than MS Powerpoint users ;-)
- the fonts set is limited to the standard Microsoft Windows' one. To display any other font properly on Slideshare, you have to convert the .ppt to .jpg or .pdf, and then back to .ppt for upload.

Now, on the content side : I have posted three different presentations, on three different subjects, aimed at three different target " users ". Here are their actual figures, as of today :
- Powerline Technology & Fiber To The Home : a new technology introduction, basic, for end-users. Posted 5 days ago, 49 views.
- wahoom.com : a new company introduction, business : decoration & interior design, for end-users. Posted 22 hours ago, 101 views.
- U.I. User Interface : presentation of my own consulting business, for prospects & clients. Posted 22 hours ago, 11 views.

As you can see, the most popular is the one about wahoom.com : I guess its " web 2.0 " type of name do raise the curiosity of most of Slideshare' visitors (although the dotcom suffix is a Bubble thing ;-) !
The "PLT & FTTH " presentation gets an average of 10 views a day since publication. To my understanding, this is a quite good number, provided that it's aimed at evangelizing a new technology : I reach ten new people each day somewhere on the Planet. That's ten more potential users each day.
The less interesting for Slideshare' users seems to be my U.I. intro. My explanation is that none of my potential clients know of Slideshare so far ;-)
The tags probably play a great role in the " success " of a presentation. For instance, the one on Powerline is tagged "FTTH", which is quite a hot topic at the moment. As I will republish the two latest (because of this fonts issue), I will add new tags to them, in order to compare the hit ratio later on.

In summary, I am pretty convinced that Slideshare can be used as a powerful viral marketing tool. One just have to figure out how to efficiently convey the message through an online slide show.

Just This (9)

Somewhere in the desert north of Dubai, UAE, May 2003.

Fiber Generation (So long, PowerPoint ;-)

Here is the presentation I have created for an ISP going to launch its FTTH services next year. The goal is to introduce Powerline Technology as the technology of choice for home networking, considering that Fiber To The Home brings more than 50 mbit/s to the Subscriber. Of course, this post contains only public information (no names here - watch the newswire in Q1 2007 for more details ;-)
I will come back soon on the content of this presentation : FTTH, Powerline, etc. For the time being, I just wanted to highlight the format : no PowerPoint here (hey, I'm a Mac guy, see what I mean ?), no Keynote either - which is an amazing tool for designers/presenters. No slides per se, thanks to Comics Life (for Mac only ;-). What better tool for story telling (a presentation IS a story) than a comics ?
I chose not to use Keynote because the audience is a prospect known for its strategy : innovation, always a step ahead of its competitors. An innovative way to present innovative technology to innovative people !

By the way, I put the file (w/o names and business-related stuff, of course) on SlideShare.net here. 27 views over 23 hours, that is quite a good ratio ;-)

Ah, there is one more thing : you are seeing small size jpg files. It is on purpose : most of you don't have an FTTH connection as of today...